Toward Summer

BUSY WEEK: I'm behind on the blog because we've had a super busy week. 

The kids' last official day of classes for spring/summer of 2016 was Thursday. That meant party time. And that meant food. 

Watermelon's a good intro-to-summer food. ...

But that's too boring. So how about watermelon pizza?

We topped watermelon slices with coconut 'cheese,' cherry fruit leather pepperoni, and raisin 'olives.' 

We took five to the party today. They were about 8 inches across. We had enough toppings left over to make a couple more pizzas tonight, so we offered them up on our Buy Nothing neighborhood group and got to play pizza delivery people. Fun! 

We delivered one pizza last night, and two this morning at 7:40 a.m. This morning's delivery went to a preschool, where the children got a big kick out of them, it's reported.

BREWERS:  In other news, our first kombucha/science project was finally ready for debut. For the past 10 days, the growlers holding the brewing kombucha were topped with coffee filters. Ironically, the SCOBY, a mix of cultures of bacteria and yeast, inside each vessel also looked like a coffee filter, in a way. 

I love everything about kombucha, but I'm kind of afraid of it in a way. I sure wouldn't drink a 'normal' glass of water sitting on my countertop for 10 days. Dare we drink this stuff?

Hope so! CJ and Annabelle each enjoyed a rootbeer flavored home brewed kombucha last night and lived to tell about it, and I drank some this morning and don't feel any worse for the wear, so I guess it's OK!

BEADY EYED: This week, Annabelle finished a special bead project for a special person. It depicts a scene from one of the recipient's favorite video games, which includes a cat named Conductor Whiskers driving a train. Atop the train, Annabelle added the recipient's real life cat.

Overall, the project used about 6200 tiny beads, each which had to be hand-placed.

COOL:  Wednesday afternoon, the kids attended a special science-themed presentation by a gentleman from SubZero Ice Cream, a chain that uses nitrogen to freeze their creations. 

There was lots of 'smoke' and even an explosion (a big balloon).  

The kids learrned lots about nitrogen, and enjoyed some tasty ice cream. 

THE WAIT IS OVER: Way back in June of 2015, CJ pre-ordered a video game, "Mighty No.  9," from the creator of the Mega Man series. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like it was worth the wait. I'll let CJ tell you more about it ...

On June 21st, Mighty No. 9, the highly anticipated spiritual successor to the Mega Man series, finally came out. Both series are the brainchild of Keiji Inafune, a Japanese video game developer. Keiji, after working at Capcom for almost 25 years, left the company in 2010. However, Capcom kept the rights to the Mega Man franchise, and used their IP poorly. Keiji decided to make his own company, Comcept, and work on a spiritual successor to the Mega Man series. After $4,000,000 spent on the project, 3 development teams (Comcept, Inti Creates, Deep Silver), 3 years in the making, and loads of hype... It's not all that great.

MN9's unfortunately slow-paced plot sounds like this: There are 9 androids created by a man named Dr. White. They are known as the "Mighty Numbers". In order, they are Pyrogen, Cryosphere, Dynatron, Seismic, Battalion, Aviator, Brandish, Countershade, and Beck. However, all of them except Beck are infected with a mysterious virus (read: Maverick Virus), and Beck has to stop them. Mighty No. 9 suffers from poor graphics reminiscent of the PS2 and an unappealing aesthetic. Mighty No. 9 also suffers from a choppy framerate, which can make it seem as though characters are teleporting (not as nice as it sounds). As I mentioned earlier, MN9's story takes longer than it should to unfold. This is particularly troublesome in the intro stage, where you will likely spend more time listening to characters providing exposition than you will actually playing the game.

I haven't watched much of the game play, but I can honestly say the trailer is one of the worst things EVAR in my humble opinion.